Tag Archives: Media

Four actresses relayed their suspicion that, after rejecting [Harvey] Weinstein’s advances and complaining about him, he had them removed from projects or persuaded others to remove them. A number of Farrow’s sources said Weinstein had referred to his success in planting stories in the media about individuals who had crossed him. … He told them that complying with his demands would help their careers, repeatedly mentioning Paltrow (without the actress’s knowledge) as someone he claimed to have had sex with. … these activities were enabled by employees, associates, and agents who set up these meetings, and lawyers and publicists who suppressed complaints with payments and threats. (more)

Ashley Judd … refused, and says he got revenge by seeking to damage her career. Director Peter Jackson has come forward to say he removed her from a casting list “as a direct result” of what he now thinks was “false information” provided by Weinstein. … Like with Ashley Judd, Peter Jackson said Weinstein warned him off casting [Mira Sorvino]. … Heather Graham … alleges he implied she had to sleep with him to get a film role, telling her that his wife would have been fine with it. … He insisted on listening to [Louisette Geiss] pitch in his hot tub, then asked her to watch him masturbate, she says – and told her he could green-light her script if she did so. … Daryl Hannah … suffered physical repercussions as her flights were cancelled and she was left stranded after she turned him down on one occasion, she adds. … Rosanna Arquette … says she rejected Weinstein’s advances and that she believes her acting career suffered as a result. (more)

What power exactly did Harvey Weinstein possess, to let him harass and rape with impunity for decades? He was an actor’s agent, who negotiated deals between actors and studios, but many agents do that. If one agent makes unreasonable demands, why not switch to another? How hard can it be anyway to evaluate an actor and suggest which projects they might be well suited for?

Well, okay, maybe it takes years to acquire good judgement, and some agents have much better judgment than others. Even so, if many agents are capable of evaluating and matching actors, how can one agent gain so much power over an actor who could easily switch to other agents?

Okay, yes, also, an actor-agent relation might develop slowly over a long time, and as with quitting a on marriage or a family, someone might put up with modest abuse before calling it quits. But Weinstein seems to have had far more power than most partners who increase in value over time.

Some say that wannabe actors are far more irrational and desperate than are most people in most relations. So they’ll do almost anything for a tiny increase of a chance for acting success. Maybe, but I want to explore other explanations, before I’m willing to conclude that.

One scenario is that corrupt agents offer to overestimate an actor’s suitability if they accept agent demands. But if the agent reneged on their promise, how would an actor enforce it? This strategy could result in studios giving them a try, seeing they are subpar, and then realizing that they are getting lower quality advice from that agent, reducing demand for that agent. And if there’s a limit to how much they could plausibly exaggerate quality, an agent could only plausibly use this strategy on the few best actors, as the rest will be rejected in any case.

Another scenario is that corrupt agents threaten to underestimate an actor’s suitability if they reject agent demands. Here enforcement is more reliably handled by the agent. If most actors give in to the threat, then most threats need not be carried out, and so the quality of signals sent to studios will be much less degraded. If the threat is carried out, studios will likely reject, and so not see that they got a bad signal. Also, this threat can be given to all types of actors, good and bad. So underestimation threats seems more effective overall than overestimation promises.

However, if an actor could easily switch to dozens of other agents, even this underestimation threat seems weak. I doubt such a threat would have moved me much when I was working with a book agent. But what if someone like Weinstein could credibly threaten, “If I give the word, you’ll never get another job in this town/industry again?”

This threat might be credible if the major acting powers formed a cabal where they agreed to believe their negative evaluations of others. Then Weinstein could tell other powers, like director Peter Jackson, that you are difficult, and none of them would audition you. If Jackson defied Weinstein and auditioned you anyway, then Weinstein could tell the other powers that Jackson is difficult. So an equilibrium could be formed where all the powers take each others’ strong negative evaluations of others at face value, for fear that otherwise they will become a target. And they could collectively benefit from this equilibrium, as they can each now make stronger credible threats to outsiders.

This sort of equilibrium seems to me very common part of human behavior. For example, academic elites in an area tend to all treat each other’s claims with respect, and endorse any of their dismissals of outsiders. In a social media mob pile on, where a big mob all says person X is bad, someone who speaks up saying X isn’t so bad should reasonably fear the mob would turn on them. And the set of top bosses in a firm typically shares an inclination to jointly reject any lower level person who challenges any one of those bosses. (“We can criticize each other privately, but we are unified in rejecting public criticism by outsiders.”)

In this sort of equilibrium, elites will in public usually say “We are the best people in this area, as proved by the fact that we all say we are best. If we all say someone else is bad, you can take that to the bank.” Sometimes they will say “George used to be good, but we all now agree that George has turned bad.” And in private each elite can say to wannabes, “Unless you do everything I demand, I’ll tell the other elites you are bad, and you’ll be out of this area for good.”

We economists tend to worry about firms colluding on prices, to keep them high, or colluding on entry, where I won’t enter your area if you don’t enter mine. But I suspect that gossip collusion like this is a far bigger problem. It happens not just in business, but in politics, arts, religion, sports, academia, journalism, law, etc.

While it would be hard, I could imagine attempts to more strong regulate and discourage this sort of behavior. But the striking thing is, we hardly even try.

Added 26Sep: Oops, seems Weinstein was a producer, not an agent. But producers serve a related role of evaluating and matching actors. A big part of the demand for him as a producer would be his ability to do those well.

As I promised yesterday, here are specific responses to the nine mass media articles that mentioned my sex redistribution post in the eight most popular media outlets, as measured by SemRush “organic traffic”. (For example, the note (21M) means 21 million in monthly traffic.) Quotes are indented; my responses are not.

My responses are somewhat repetitive, as most seem content to claim that self-labeled “incels” advocating for sex redistribution are deeply icky people, and especially that they are women-hating. Even if that were true, however, that doesn’t to me say much about the wisdom or value of sex redistribution. I’m much more interested in general sex inequality than I am in the issues of the tiny fraction self-labeled “incel” activists. Continue reading "Responses to Sex Inequality Critics" »

If you’ve laughed at “X is not about Y”, now is the time to take it seriously, as an equal.

Over the years, many seem to have found my “X is not about Y” arguments to be enjoyably mockable. As if I would be equally likely to say “Toasters are not about toast” or “Napkin holders are not about napkins.” Which seems to suggest that while my claims might be important if true, they are too silly to take seriously.

Now I don’t mind people having fun, but I do worry about the human habit to dismiss as unworthy of attention things that have been wittily mocked. (See the movie Ridicule.) If you worry about that too, and if you’ve at least smirked some at “X is not about Y” jokes, then perhaps I can appeal to your guilt or concern to take the time now to engage the argument.

Now publishers and the media usually coordinate to talk about new books near the day when hardback copies are officially released. Which for our book is January 2. Usually ebooks are also withheld until near that date. As a result, usually the only people who can say much about a book at its official release date are elites who have been given special access to pre-release copies. Those who talk about a book weeks or months later are clearly revealed as less elites, and get less attention.

But now for our book all of you can participate more as equals in that release date book conversation. If you read our book now, and then publicly post a review or engage our argument near the release date, and indicate that you’d like us to publicly engage your response, then we will try to do so. When time is limited we will of course focus more on responses that we think are better argued. But we will try to engage as many of you as possible, without giving undue priority to media and other elites.

So please, go read, and then join our debate. Just how often is it plausible that “X is not about Y”?

Casual conversation norms say to wander across many topics, with each person staying relevant to each current topic. This functions well to test individual impressiveness. Today, academic and mass media conversations today follow similar norms, though they did this much less in the ancient world.

While ancient artists and musicians tried to perfect common styles, modern artists and musicians seek more distinctive personal styles. For example, while songs were once designed to sound good when ordinary folks sang them, now songs are designed to create a unique impressive performance by one artist.

Politicians often go out of their way to do “position taking” on many issues, even on issues they have little chance of influencing policy while in office. Voters prefer systems like proportional representation where voters can identify more closely with particular representatives, even if this doesn’t give voters better outcomes overall. Knowing many of a politician’s positions helps voters to identify with them.

“Sophomoric” thinkers, typically college sophomores, are eager to take positions on as many common topics as possible, even if this means taking poorly consider positions. They don’t feel they are adult until they have an opinion ready for most common intellectual conversations. This is more feasible when opinions on each topic area are reduced to choices between a small number of standard “isms”, offering integrated packages of answers. Sophomoric thinkers love isms.

We often try to extract “isms” out of individuals, such as my colleagues Tyler Cowen or Bryan Caplan. We might ask “What is the Caplanian position on X?” That is, we wonder how they would answer random questions, presuming that we can infer a coherent style from past positions that would answer all future questions, at least within some wide scope. Intellectuals who desire wider attention often go out of their way to express opinions on many topics, chosen via a distinctive personal style.

We pretend that we search only for truth, picking each specific position only via the strongest specific evidence and arguments. And in many mundane contexts that’s not a bad approximation. But in many other grander contexts we seek more to become and associate with distinctive intellectual artists. Such artists are impressive both via the wide range of topics on which they can be impressive, and via having a distinctive personal style that they can bring to bear on this range of topics.

This all makes complete sense as an impressiveness contest, but far less sense as a way for the world to jointly estimate accurate Bayesian estimates on each topic. I’m sure you can make up reasons why distinctive intellectual styles that imply positions on wide ranges of topics are really great ways to produce accuracy. But they will mostly sound like excuses to me.

Sophomoric thinkers often retain for a lifetime the random opinions they quickly generate without much thought. Yet they don’t want to just inherit their parents positions; they need to generate their own new opinions. I wonder which effect will dominate when young ems choose opinions; will they tend to adopt standard positions of prior clan members, or generate their own new individual opinions?

While our personalities are correlated with whether we are liberal or conservative, it seems that neither one of these causes the other. Instead, their correlation is caused by something else that causes both, and that is caused in part by genetics:

The primary assumption within the recent personality and political orientations literature is that personality traits cause people to develop political attitudes. In contrast, … the covariance between personality and political preferences is not causal, but due to a common, latent genetic factor that mutually influences both. … Change in personality over a ten-year period does not predict change in political attitudes. .. Rather, political attitudes are often more stable than the key personality traits assumed to be predicting them. (more)

Amazingly, we know of another variable B that fits this bill, of being correlated with both personality A and political orientation C, and mediating their relation. In technical language, A and C are conditionally independent given B, so that P(C|AB) = P(C|B). This B is preferences for media genres!

Research has consistently demonstrated that political liberalism is predicted by the personality trait Openness to Experience and conservatism by trait Conscientiousness. … Increased preferences for Dark/Alternative and Aesthetic/Musical media genres, as well as decreased preferences for Communal/Popular media genres, mediated the association between Openness to Experience and liberalism. In contrast, greater preferences for Communal/Popular and Thrilling/Action genres, as well as lower preferences for Dark/Alternative and Aesthetic/Musical genres mediated the link between Conscientiousness and conservatism. (more)

So media genre preference is actually a plausible candidate for something closer to whatever causes personality and political orientation, and is caused in part by genes. This makes intuitive sense to me, because I personally feel more aware of, confident in, and comfortable with my media genre preferences than in my personality types or my political orientation.

These authors (Xiaowen Xu & Jordan Peterson) took a survey of 543 US people, and did a factor analysis on their media preferences. They found five factors. The strongest media factor is:

This factor doesn’t correlate with political orientation, but it does correlate with the openness personality factor, which has a subfactor of intellect, so this all makes sense.

The other four media factors split nicely into a 2×2 matrix along two dimensions. One dimension is “highbrow” vs. “lowbrow.” (Cerebral/Nonfiction is also “highbrow”.) The other dimension is personality/politics: two factors correlate with both liberals and those with open personalities, and two factors correlate with both conservatives and those with conscientious personalities. Here are these four media factors:

While personality and political variables come from factor analyses of survey answers to relatively abstract attitude and opinion question, media genre variables seem more closely related to concrete real-life choices that people make. And it makes sense to me that our genes (and culture) more directly cause our inclinations to take concrete actions, and that abstract attitudes and opinions result more indirectly, from our trying to rationalize those actions. So it makes sense to me that media genre preferences are closer to more direct genetic (and cultural) causality.

A few more results from the paper: Older people prefer Dark/Alternative less and Cerebral/Nonfiction more, while women prefer Communal/Popular more and Thrilling/Action less. These can explain the personality correlates of age and gender. Agreeableness is higher for those who like highbrow genres (except Aesthetic/Musical has no effect), and less for those who like lowbrow genres. Extraversion is higher for those who like conservative genres, though it doesn’t correlate directly politics directly because personality factors are highly correlated in this dataset. Neuroticism is less for those who like Cerebral/Nonfiction and Thrilling/Action.

Years ago I was being surprised to learn that patients usually can’t pick docs based on track records of previous patient outcomes. Because, people say, that would invade privacy and make bad incentives for docs picking patients. They suggest instead relying on personal impressions, wait times, “bedside” manner, and prestige of doc med school or hospital. (Yeah, those couldn’t possibly make bad incentives.) Few ever study if such cues correlate with patient outcomes, and we actively prevent the collection of patient satisfaction track records.

For lawyers, most trials are in the public record, so privacy shouldn’t be an obstacle to getting track records. So people pick lawyers based on track records, right? Actually no. People who askarerepeatedlytold: no practically you can’t get lawyer track records, so just pick lawyers based on personal impressions or the prestige of their law firm or school. (Few study if those correlate with client outcomes.)

Despite being public record, court data is surprisingly inaccessible in bulk, nor is there a unified system to access it, outside of the Federal Courts. Clerks of courts refused Premonition requests for case data. Resolved to go about it the hard way, Unwin … wrote a web crawler to mine courthouse web sites for the data, read it, then analyze it in a database. …

Many publications run “Top Lawyer” lists, people who are recognized by their peers as being “the best”. Premonition analyzed the win rates of these attorneys, it turned out most were average. The only way that they stood out was a disproportionate number of appealed and re-opened cases, i.e. they were good at dragging out litigation. They discovered that even the law firms themselves were poor at picking litigators. In a study of the United Kingdom Court of Appeals, it found a slight negative correlation of -0.1 between win rates and re-hiring rates, i.e. a barrister 20% better than their peers was actually 2% less likely to be re-hired! … Premonition was formed in March 2014 and expected to find a fertile market for their services amongst the big law firms. They found little appetite and much opposition. …

The system found an attorney with 22 straight wins before the judge – the next person down was 7. A bit of checking revealed the lawyer was actually a criminal defense specialist who operated out of a strip mall. … The firm claims such outliers are far from rare. Their web site … shows an example of an attorney with 32 straight wins before a judge in Orange County, Florida. (more)

As a society we supposedly coordinate in many ways to make medicine and law more effective, such as via funding med research, licensing professionals, and publishing legal precedents. Yet we don’t bother to coordinate to create track records for docs or lawyers, and in fact our public representatives tend to actively block such things. And strikingly: customers don’t much care. A politician who proposed to dump professional licensing would face outrage, and lose. A politician who proposed to post public track records would instead lose by being too boring.

On reflection, these examples are part of a larger pattern. For example, I’ve mentioned before that a media firm had a project to collect track records of media pundits, but then abandoned the project once it realized that this would reduce reader demand for pundits. Readers are instead told to pick pundits based on their wit, fame, and publication prestige. If readers really wanted pundit track records, some publication would offer them, but readers don’t much care.

Attempts to publish track records of school teachers based on students outcomes have produced mostly opposition. Parents are instead encouraged to rely on personal impressions and the prestige of where the person teaches or went to school. No one even considers doing this for college teachers, we at most just survey student satisfaction just after a class ends (and don’t even do that right).

Regarding student evaluations, we coordinate greatly to make standard widely accessible tests for deciding who to admit to schools. But we have almost no such measures of students when they leave school for work. Instead of showing employers a standard measure of what students have learned, we tell employers to rely on personal impressions and the prestige of the school from which the student came. Some have suggested making standard what-I-learned tests, but few are interested, including employers.

For researchers like myself, publications and job position are measures of endorsements by prestigious authorities. Citations are a better measure of the long term impact of research on intellectual progress, but citations get much less attention in evaluations of researchers. Academics don’t put their citation count on their vita (= resume), and when a reporter decides which researcher to call, or a department decides who to hire, they don’t look much at citations. (Yes, I look better by citations than by publications or jobs, and my prestige is based more on the later.)

Related is the phenomenon of people being more interested in others said to have the potential to achieve X, than in people who have actually achieved X. Related also is the phenomenon of firms being reluctant to use formulaic measures of employee performance that aren’t mediated mostly by subjective boss evaluations.

It seems to me that there are striking common patterns here, and I have in mind a common explanation for them. But I’ll wait to explain that in my next post. Till then, how do you explain these patterns? And what other data do we have on how we treat track records elsewhere?

Added 22Mar: Real estate sales are also technically in the public record, and yet it is hard for customers to collect comparable sales track records for real estate agents, and few seem to care enough to ask for them.

Imagine that you wanted to write a popular book on the anxiety de jour, and that this anxiety happened to be increased moral depravity. Well there’d be an easy time-tested recipe to follow.

First, give some plausibility arguments for why moral depravity is a big deal. Since everyone already thinks so, weak arguments would be fine. Second, give lots of concrete examples of people and orgs affected by moral depravity, examples readers can relate to. Especially examples about high status and new things – people love to read about those. Third, mention important recent worrying trends backed up by serious research, and vaguely suggest that these trends are caused by increased moral depravity. No need for concrete arguments, you just need to show you are a serious person tracking serious trends. Finally, recommend a bunch of policies to deal with moral depravity, policies many of your readers already support, and that you would havesupported even if every one of those recent trends were opposite.

Most important: have your book come out just as talk about moral depravity was peaking, and be an author with a lot of status in reader eyes. Your readers would mainly just want a book they could point to as they argue the topic, so they’d mainly just want an easy read without subtle arguments that they could fail to understand.

This is the recipe that Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee follow in their new book The Second Machine Age. They are high status authors, and their book arrives just as computer anxiety is peaking. First, they suggest that computers will cause an economic revolution as big as the industrial revolution, which they say was caused by the steam engine. Second, they review lots of fashionable new computer products, demos and hoped-for revolutions. Third, they review serious recent trends backed up by serious research, including decreasing labor fraction of income, and increasing wage variance. They vaguely suggest that these trends are caused by computers, but offer relatively little evidence in support of this claim. Finally, they offer a bunch of standard policy recommendations that they would have made anyway, even if all these trends had been the opposite.

While reviewing trends, the book points to this graph (taken from this paper):

It compares recent US productivity growth to growth during the era of electrification, 1890-1940, and suggests that growth might increase soon, if it follows the same pattern. But if this is the growth effect size to expect from computers, it is vastly smaller than the industrial revolution, which sustainably increased growth rates by over a factor of fifty (and is not at all well summarized as caused by steam engines). Of course these book authors are careful not to make strong explicit claims – they are content to vaguely suggest.

So how is one supposed to evaluate a book like this, without original contributions, strong claims, or explicit central arguments to evaluate? The standard intended seems to just be popularity: it is a success if people buy it and mention it lots as they anxiously discuss how computers might change society. And then push for the same policies they would have pushed for anyway, regardless. And by that standard, this book will probably be a success.

I’m planning to write a book, a book I want to both be engaging to a wide audience, and to adequately defend some complex non-obvious intellectual claims. It feels quite daunting to write with both of these goals in mind at once. So I’m thinking of achieving these two goals in two steps. First I’d write a pre-book, which states my main claims and arguments directly and clearly, using expert language, for an expert audience. I’d then circulate that pre-book privately among experts and useful thinkers of various sorts, seeking criticism of my arguments. Then using their feedback, I’d revise my claims and arguments, and write an engaging accessible book that can be circulated widely.

While this strategy seems to make sense, I rarely hear of anyone doing it. Why? Some possible explanations:

Lots of writers do this; they just don’t let it be known, as that makes them seem unconfident.

Most writers think they know what experts will think about each opinion they will express, and see little value in getting expert feedback on the package of opinions they will express.

A pre-book nearly doubles a writer’s effort, and few writers of accessible books are willing to do this just to get a more intellectually defensible argument.

Far fewer experts are willing to comment on a private pre-book than are willing to publicly criticize a published book. The main way to get feedback is to publish things.

The readers of the pre-book will be offended that their feedback don’t much change the writer’s opinions.

If the pre-book is circulated too widely, that will cut too far into the book sales.

Critics with access to the pre-book might embarrass the author by pointing the many changes of opinion in the book.

Good writers don’t find it very hard to simultaneously write both defensibly and accessibly.

Writers choose a book concept based on what they think will sell. Getting expert feedback on a pre-book might change author opinions too much, making it harder to sincerely write the initial book concept.